Digital Action Receipts

Verifiable, append-only records of digital actions, generated at the moment they occur — designed to be referenced later during audits, disputes, and “what happened?” questions.

Canonical idea (minimal API surface)

await issueReceipt({
  actor: "system|service|agent|user",
  action: "access.approved",
  object: "resource:payments",
  ref: "internal-id-123"
})

The problem this addresses

Modern systems rely on logs, screenshots, and ad-hoc narratives to reconstruct what happened. As automation and AI agents increase action volume and autonomy, post-hoc reconstruction becomes expensive, slow, and contested.

Logs are hard to correlate across services, teams, and vendors.
Evidence is not created at decision time; it’s pieced together later.
“Who did what, when, and under which authority?” becomes ambiguous.

How it works

1) Action happens

A deployment, approval, access change, payment authorization, or agent-run task occurs in an existing system.

2) Receipt created

At execution time, a small receipt is issued: neutral, tamper-evident, and referenceable.

3) Receipt referenced

Later, the receipt ID or verification link is pasted into a ticket, audit note, or internal doc.

4) Independently verified

Anyone can verify the receipt without privileged access to internal logs or systems.

Where this shows up first

Access & identity: approvals, role changes, privileged actions
Infrastructure: deployments, config changes, automation events
Financial ops: payment authorization, limit changes, release approvals
Healthcare workflows: consent events, access grants, record actions
AI agents: actions taken on behalf of a user or organization

Docs

These short documents define the primitive (what a receipt is, what it proves, and what it does not), and provide a dead-simple integration path you can adopt in minutes without re-architecting systems.